SOURCE: “Shakespearean Dreamplay,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter, 1981, pp. 44-69.

In the following excerpt, Stewart examines Bottom's insights regarding the relationship between dream and drama, and the language he uses to express his revelation.

“I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.” 

—Bottom

“Your actions are my dreams.” 

—Leontes

Passing the tests of New and then Myth Criticism, with their bias respectively toward close and deep reading, Shakespeare's plays have come of late into an epoch of supra-reading, which boasts its own exhilaration as well as its own excess.¹ With the texts open before us, we are no longer asked to imagine the plays on the boards at the Globe, but rather staged in some obliquely lit metatheater, attended by its audience not just as a chosen drama but as the Idea of Drama. By treating their own formal properties as part of their business...